In order to meet the demand for wireless data traffic soaring since the 4G communication system came to the market, there are ongoing efforts to develop enhanced 5G communication systems or pre-5G communication systems. For the reasons, the 5G communication system or pre-5G communication system is called the beyond 4G network communication system or post LTE system.
For higher data transmit rates, 5G communication systems are considered to be implemented on ultrahigh frequency bands (mmWave), such as, e.g., 60 GHz. To mitigate path loss on the ultrahigh frequency band and increase the reach of radio waves, the following techniques are taken into account for the 5G communication system: beamforming, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO), full dimensional MIMO (FD-MIMO), array antenna, analog beamforming, and large scale antenna.
Also being developed are various technologies for the 5G communication system to have an enhanced network, such as evolved or advanced small cell, cloud radio access network (cloud RAN), ultra-dense network, device-to-device (D2D) communication, wireless backhaul, moving network, cooperative communication, coordinated multi-point (CoMP), and interference cancellation.
There are also other various schemes under development for the 5G system including, e.g., hybrid FSK and QAM modulation (FQAM) and sliding window superposition coding (SWSC), which are advanced coding modulation (ACM) schemes, and filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and sparse code multiple access (SCMA), which are advanced access schemes.
Meanwhile, a diversity of radio communication techniques is in development by the growing information communication technology. Among others, the wireless local area network (WLAN) system enables wireless access to the Internet in a home, business, or an area offering a particular service through a personal digital assistant (PDA), a laptop computer, a portable multimedia player (PMP), or other portable terminals (hereinafter, referred to as a “WLAN terminal”) based on radio frequency technology.
A mobile terminal equipped with a WLAN interface scans ambient accessible WLAN access points (APs) while the WLAN interface stays on.
The scanning comes in two ways.
The first method is passive scanning.
In the passive scanning method, an AP periodically broadcasts beacon frames to the mobile terminal. Passive scanning consumes much more time than active scanning does for hearing and thus passive scanning consumes ten times more power than active scanning. In the case of passive scanning, the AP normally has a beacon period of 100 ms.
The second method is active scanning.
In the active scanning method, when a mobile terminal sends a request, an AP responds to the request. For active scanning, about 10 ms is required to scan one channel.
Such time gap causes passive scanning to consume much more power than active scanning.
As such, the wireless scanning process takes a long time, and the scanning process results in increased power consumption.
The above information is presented as background information only to assist with an understanding of the present disclosure. No determination has been made, and no assertion is made, as to whether any of the above might be applicable as prior art with regard to the present disclosure.